The present invention relates to a process and apparatus for the feeding of a filling member with low tension to a loom without substantial twist and more particularly relates to such a process and apparatus in which an amount of filling member is accumulated to meet high demand for the filling member when the loom rapidly accelerates.
Looms are available for weaving fabrics with a wide variety of weft yarns including those of high denier. It has been found that such looms are also useful when the weft is heavy denier monofilament of a thermoplastic polymer or a heavy denier composite tape. While the loom otherwise has the capability to handle such filling members, there are problems with feeding such filling members to the loom. For example, a rapier loom can nearly instantaneously accelerate to full process speed by virtue of its electro-magnetic clutch and brake system, e.g., 1/4 second, and similarly go from full process speed to a stopped condition in the same time frame. During the rapid starting and stopping of the loom and also during normal running at the process speeds, it is necessary to keep the resisting tension low as the filling member is fed to the loom.
Known apparatus for supplying weft yarns to a loom typically feeds the yarn over end from a yarn package to meet the requirement of low resisting tension. However, this is unsuitable for heavy denier monofilament, composite tapes and certain stiff filling members since twist is inserted. If a substantial amount of twist is inserted in such heavy denier and/or stiff filling members, kinks can be introduced into the filling which may adversely affect the product and can cause process interruptions. With filling members such as monofilament which has a cross-sectional shape which is oblong, i.e., its width being longer than its thickness, this is a particular problem since typically no twist can be tolerated. In addition, it would be difficult to pull monofilament or other stiff filling members over end from a package since they will have a tendency to unravel from a package when the tension is released.